Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

When I say to the Moment flying; 'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' Then bind me in thy bonds undying, And my final ruin I will bear!

The brilliant passes, like the dew at morn; The true endures, for ages yet unborn.

To me the external existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work incessantly until my death, nature will give me another form of existence when the present can no longer sustain my spirit.

Beautiful is greater than Good, for it includes the Good.

Investigate what is, and not what pleases.

Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.

They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!

Let no one be like another, yet everyone like the highest. How is this done? Be each one perfect in himself.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

No matter what one says, you can recognize only those matters that are equal to you. Only rulers who possess extraordinary abilities will recognize and esteem properly extraordinary abilities in their subjects and servants.

A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.

People will allow their faults to be shown them; they will let themselves be punished for them; they will patiently endure many things because of them; they only become impatient when they have to lay them aside.

Every individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

The history of mankind is his character.

We don't get to know anything but what we love.

The day is of infinite length for him who knows how to appreciate and use it.

Night is the other half of life, and the better half.

All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. . . . How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for.

We love a girl for very different qualities than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding.

I am the Spirit that denies.

Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.

Everything is hard before it is easy.

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

As soon as you are in a social setting, you better take away the key to the lock of your heart and pocket it; those who leave thekey in the lock are fools.

I will listen to anyone's convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.

Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.

Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

Nothing is true, but that which is simple.

To quit smoking, you must first want to quit, but then you must also do the quitting

To live within limits. To want one thing. Or a few things very much and love them dearly. Cling to them, survey them from every angle. Become one with them - that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being.

Smoothly and lightly the golden seed by the furrow is covered.

I will say with Lorenzo de Medici that those who do not hope for another life are always dead to this one.

He who is wise puts aside all claims which may dissipate his attention, and confining himself to one branch excels in that.

Everything in science depends on what one calls an aperçu, on becoming aware of what is at the bottom of the phenomena. Such becoming aware is infinitely fertile.

I always seek the good that is in people and leave the bad to Him who made mankind and knows how to round off the corners.

We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out, only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant more easily than we can endure the insignificant.

Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree.

People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.

When one is polite in German, one lies.

One must be something to be able to do something.

Thought expands, but paralyzes; action animates, but narrows.

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

Superstition is rooted in a much deeper and more sensitive layer of the psyche than skepticism.